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We had a great day today, visiting Sofie’s twin sister Sanna in Ã–rebro. We were mostly just walking around (me often a few meters behind taking pictures), but it was really nice. Ã–rebro is actually a very nice city to be in, better I’d say than my home town Eskilstuna.

On a somewhat related notice, does anyone know why the Picasa exported images have modified shutter speed values in the JPEG EXIF information? For example, this picture originally has a shutter speed of 1/800th second, but after slightly adjusting the contrast, cropping, and exporting it in Picasa, the shutter speed changed to 1/3 second. Annoying!

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I took some photos yesterday while having lunch at a restaurant in Kvicksund. After that, we went to one of Sofie’s older sisters to see her horses. I’m slowly starting to master the new camera I bought last month (Canon PowerShot S3 IS).

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It seems Freespire are doing the right thing after all by renaming their modified version of Firefox to something else. However, I still think there is some inconsistency in their branding. Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony claims that the browser is called Web Browser everywhere but for the actual file name. That is not entirely accurate, since LBrowser is also used to describe the product in the About window, which is where people usually look for product information. Furthermore, the upcoming splash screen just says “browser”, with a lower case b. To summarize, we have Web Browser, LBrowser, and browser, all powered by Firefox! :)

Naming issues aside, I haven’t yet found any improvements(1) in Web Browser (let’s call it that) compared to Firefox, but a few things made worse. For example, many shortcuts I use daily are changed. I can no longer middle-click on a tab to close it. I can no longer Ctrl+Tab to cycle through the opened tabs (that instead cycles between the virtual desktops). Maybe this is configurable somewhere, but it’s definitely a degraded initial experience compared to what I’m used to. There are some true bugs as well, such as a flickering mouse cursor, non-working link clicks, slow and lagging keyboard repeating, and a few misaligned pixels in the Gecko rendered output, but that’s probably expected in a beta (although I’ve never experienced problems like this in Ubuntu, beta or not). Maybe it’s KDE issues too. Coming from Gnome, I honestly don’t know.

I’m going to blog more about Freespire in general in the future, I just wanted to sort this out about LBrowser Web Browser.

(1): Ok, I have found one new feature, but I’m not sure if it’s an improvement. When you hover the mouse over a word, it becomes highlighted in yellow. If you click on it, a tiny (almost illegible) pop-up menu appears with a few somewhat confusing items, such as “Web”, and “News”. Appearantly, if you click on e.g. “Web”, a web search is performed on the highlighted word. It would have been much clearer what the menu item does if it had been labeled e.g. “Web search for [word]”, but the general idea is neat. I think it would fit much better in the normal context sensitive menu though. This yellow menu lookalike hack isn’t exactly accessible.

Update: Here’s a screenshot of the beast:

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I just tried out the Freespire Beta 1 Live CD (in fact, I’m writing this post from it). That’s not the interesting part, however. More specifically, I’m writing this post from LBrowser! It’s the first time I’ve tried this new web browser and I must say I quite like it. It has the same default toolbar and tab browsing capabilities as Firefox. It even uses a similar icon and toolbar graphics. I also like the fact that it has support for both extensions and themes in the same way as Firefox does. Appearantly, it’s even Powered by Firefox! How cool is that?

Then I clicked the Email button and found out about this great e-mail client called Lmail. It looks and works exactly like Thunderbird. Incidentally, it’s also Powered by Thunderbird. I don’t know what it means, but it feels good to know it has some of the power of Thunderbird in it!

Seriously though, I’ve read that Linspire provides Mozilla with funding, but do they really need to rename famous and recognized brands like Firefox and Thunderbird? LBrowser and Lmail just sounds silly to say the least. Note also the inconsistency (should be LMail, not Lmail).

I might blog more about Freespire later. On an unrelated notice, new photo albums have been uploaded in the photo gallery.

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Ever so often nowadays, Gmail seems to be down or just terribly slow. Has anyone else noticed this? If it keeps being this unreliable, I can might as well run my own mail server. Besides, that would be more fun. :)